On this field, snack is king

For soccer kids, the game is just a prelude

If it's October, it must be youth soccer season. And if it's youth soccer season, it also must be snack season. For soccer--at least among the under-8 set--is not about soccer. It's about snack.

Travel to virtually any open field in the greater Chicago area on a Saturday morning to observe this phenomenon firsthand. See how children who devoted most of the game to picking dandelions at midfield turn into David Beckham when the goal is not a smallish net on the far side of the field but the cooler on the sidelines.

The ritual of the postgame snack, in fact, is far more regulated than the match itself, which, as any experienced soccer parent will tell you, resembles little more than a giant, polyester-shirted amoeba inching its way up and down a patch of grass for about 45 minutes.

The first rule of snack is that there must always be snack. Woe to the parents who forget their spot on the snack schedule and must face a sea of sweaty, angry young faces turned toward their empty arms.

Only slightly less humiliating than no snack is the snack suddenly remembered and scrounged from the kitchen cupboard moments before the game. Believe me, the young gourmands of the American Youth Soccer Organization know from off-brand graham crackers.

Which brings us to the second rule of snack: Snack cannot be healthy. To bring carrot sticks to your children's game is to risk subjecting them to public peer-group humiliation for the remainder of the season. Snack must be the kind of food you would not want toadmit that you allow your children to eat: Fruit Roll-Ups that stamp the tongue with temporary dinosaur-track tattoos, Pringles printed with bad jokes, etc.

The first subclause of the second rule of snack is that only fathers can bring the unhealthiest sort of snack without receiving the raised eyebrow of disapproval from other parents. Fathers are expected to do all sorts of unsuitable things, among them serving giant bottles of Gatorade Riptide Rush to a bunch of 7-year-olds at 9:30a.m. (The second subclause is that, in kids' minds, Gatorade is better than Capri Sun is better than a juice box.)

The third rule of snack is that you must bring enough snack to feed not only the members of your child's team but their assorted siblings. The Bush administration, in its attempts to improve counterterrorism espionage efforts abroad, could do worse than to observe the expert techniques of infiltration practiced by younger brothers and sisters on our local soccer fields.

I know--very well--one child who can sprint across the length of a playground and nonchalantly embed himself inside the nucleus of the postgame pep talk, within striking distance of snack, just moments after the whistle's final blast.

The fourth rule of snack is that the finer details of presentation are irrelevant. It does not matter if the Sunny Delight is adequately chilled or the Krispy Kreme served with a napkin. All that matters is that snack remain hidden until the moment it is to be served, to avoid a stampede off the field.

If we were to attempt to draw some broader conclusions about the relevance of snack, we would argue that snack is one more symbol of the ratcheting up of the American childhood. We would compare snack to that MTV program where whiny teenagers celebrate their 16th birthdays with parties that include helicopter rides and concerts by Kanye West. We would discuss the disturbing emergence of the halftime snack phenomenon.

Snack opponents would lay out their efforts to abolish snack or pass legislation to set age limits at which snack is no longer allowed. Experts would warn us that snack contributes to the epidemic of obesity among our young people.

All of this may well be the case, but that is not our concern here. Our concern is what we're going to bring when it's our turn.